A government monopoly on firearms creates a situation where a military Junta can act without fear of retaliation by the people. Thus the Junta in Burma is sending monks to slave camps while dismissively meeting with an important U.N. envoy for 15 minutes without fear that the totalitarian supporting world community will invade and secure in the knowledge that the Burmese themselves can do nothing to stop them.

If the Burmese were able to defend themselves and their Buddhist monk brethren, the ineffectual United Nations and self pitying American left’s impotence in the face of this Nazi like madness would be a moot point. But they can’t defend themselves. They are relying on the largess of the world community to save them.

Of course, as Darfur has proven time and again, the world is full of tyrant enablers who are more interested in “peace” than stopping genocide. The Jews have learned this the hard way and because so many Jewish people have taken this lesson to heart they are vilified by the American left and the world community. Vilified in large part because the nation of Israel won’t allow a second holocaust to be perpetrated by Islamist terrorists.

The left is advocating for policies exactly like the gun control in Burma. Yet it is the left that constantly makes the charge that Republicans are planning some sort of military coup. It makes you wonder what they’re planning for the future if they want a disarmed populace who, in their opinion, were just days away from a military takeover.

In Burma, we see the end result of an unarmed population living under a Socialist dictatorship. The Burmese are now learning that the world will never help them, and the end of a once great civilization is at hand. From Samazdata (h/t Maggie’s Farm):

Burma is a good example of ‘gun control’, i.e. a state of affairs where firearms are a legal monopoly of the government forces. One side has good intentions and the other side has loaded rifles, and the result (so far) has been the same as it was in 1988 – or even back in 1962 when the late General Ne Win first set up his socialist administration.

However, me being a cold hearted man whose mind starts to wander even when shown scenes of murder and other horror, the situation reminds me of the philosophy of David Hume. This mid 18th century Scottish philosopher claimed that government was not based on force – but rather that it was based on opinion. Hume did this to mock the claim that there was a great difference between the ‘constitutional’ government of Britain and the ‘tyranny’ of France – under the skin both sides are basically the same, was his point.

This was part of David Hume’s love of attacking what his opponents (such as Thomas Reid) were to call “Common Sense”. David Hume was involved in what are now called ‘counter intuitive’ positions. Hume claimed (at times) that there was no objective reality – that the physical universe was just sense impressions in the mind. This did not stop him also claiming (at times) that the mind did not exist, in the sense of a thinking being, that a thought did not mean a thinker – that there was no agent and thus no free willed being.

Whether David Hume actually believed any of this – or whether he was just saying to people “you do not have any strong arguments for your most basic beliefs – see how weak reason is”… is not the point here. The point is that many people. including many people who have never heard his name, have been influenced by the ideas of David Hume.

For example, Louis XVI of France did not actively resist his enemies, going so far as ordering others, such as the Swiss Guard, not to resist, because he had read David Hume’s History of England – it was his favourite book. In his history Hume claimed that Charles the First did not get killed because he lost the Civil War (as a simple minded ordinary man might think) – but because he had fought back against his enemies at all. If he had not resisted his enemies, they would have seen no need to kill him (a clever counter intuitive position).

So Louis XVI did not resist. It is possible that he was given cause to doubt Hume’s wisdom right before his enemies murdered him, and so many others, but we will never know the answer to that I suppose.

In Burma, as in so many other places, many people seem to have thought that opinion, namely the good intentions of the majority, were more important than firepower – they appear to be mistaken.

As the world sorts itself out in the face of the new reality of an impotent America, hindered from within by a collection of nihilistic, post-modernist political groups who are buying their way into the the Democratic party, more massacres will happen in more countries where people are denied their essential rights to defend themselves. Let us hope that here in America the situation isn’t remains as it is, a large armed population capable of defending itself from actual tyranny, rather than be massacred as the world watches and does nothing.